Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Wikipedia is a great reference for quickly looking up anything. This has been my experience so far. Be it a city, a software, really anything – I typically was able to find something that got me started in my search of understanding more about the topic in question.

With the caveat that I understood that I can not fully rely on information on Wikipedia to be 100$ true and verified. It has been created by people like you and me, and then added or changed over time.

A legal court in Germany has now ruled that Wikipedia is legally responsible for some disputed content. It is NOT that Wikipedia now has to confirm and verify everything. But if something is disputed to be wrong, they’ll have to look into it.

Bummer for Wikipedia ? Bummer for open source referencing ? I think the effect benefits the end-user. There have been circumstances where I ran into some things that I knew to be not accurate ( ) on Wikipedia. Now there is a process to correct that. A step towards making Wikipedia more reliable.

Saturday, September 07, 2013

English: Suspension bridges are suspended from cables. The earliest suspension bridges were made of ropes or vines covered with pieces of bamboo. In this picture the suspension bridge, which is now only for human use, is in Astore Valley. This type of bridge is found in the Gilgit-Baltistan area of Pakistan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

and mentioned that Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later) has a listen function, the Economist has an audio edition and Umano is an app that read news articles out loud. These are what I use when I walk, jog, take public transportation or via bluetooth and car speaker system listen to when I drive.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Gamification provides a roadmap to foster people engaging in the means of knowledge capturing, sharing and re-use. The idea is that gamification makes it more enticing to capture knowledge to gain rewards, share knowledge to collect badges, and re-use knowledge to achieve other trophies (or any combination there-of) .It also fosters more engagement in related area like online learning.

Two challenges to consider

Gamification of Life (Jul ’11) (Photo credit: VFS Digital Design)

1. Playing games is not an ongoing thing. People play when they feel like it. A good game keeps you interested, but that only goes so far.

2. There are lessons to be learned from the past of reward and recognition programs. Points, rewards, badges are not enough for long-term engagement. It still comes down to understanding, embracing and engaging on a purpose-level or professional/work related relevance

Imagine a battery so powerful, that it can jumpstart your car. Imagine your smartphone to work day and night for a whole month. That is what the near future could bring, if this new kind of batteries will become available soon. Best of all – if its empty – it could recharge within minutes.

DOW KOKAM Lithium Ion batteries (Photo credit: amcgore)

Imagine the implications for electric cars, for the availability of electricity in the developing world. Is it unfair to say, this could change the world. We’ll see.

Keynote of Yammer tour in Chicago is starting. Adam Pisoni, CTO and CoFounder of Yammer is highlighting the reason for purchase and integration with Microsoft. He is interested and wants to talk about ‘disruption’. SVP business software solutions is talking next about the information revolution based on an IDC 2013 report.

He is talking about four forces of industry transformation. cloud, mobility, big data/analytics and social business – as of today.

Sensing and responding is the new business model, instead of creating a product and selling it.

Social business is here and here to stay. see slide above.

Adam is now talking about Tower Records and Napster and ITunes, how the later two disrupted Tower Records 1 billiion dollar business.

The pace of change is accelerating. The faster we connect, the faster we change. The lifecycle of disruptive technologies is now below 5 years, impacting everybody in some way.

The more efficient we get, the less adaptable we become. Disruption is about someone else figures out how to provide the value you are providing better than you.

Capatilize on disruption: Align (on common goals and value you provide), organize (conways law – companies create products and services that represent the way they communicate internally), empower (employees to innovae on how they provide value), adapt (kaizen, constant improvement).

NAB (australian bank) has YamJams about discussing a particular problem and innovate a solution.

Deconstruct and reconstruct your business virtually on a regular basis to always build the best company possible.